Living in the End Times
These are the notes I made whilst making Living in The End Times:
What a concrete block and a jellyfish have in common.
Think of William Burroughs cut up narrative style.
Excel centre London - arms fair and nightingale hospital
Tate and Lyle - Pontoon dock
Empty massive yard opposite O2
Plastic wrapped meat
The totalitarianism inherent in corporate structures.
Picture of a globe
Images of the future: Collapse being a good example.
Strong flash shot of small plant growing in the gutter.
Violence as effect of material inequality - text panels
Robbe Grillet - check out
Pour away that youth; That overflows the heart; Into hair and mouth; Take the grave’s part, Tell the bone’s truth.
Throw away that youth; That jewel in the head; That bronze in the breath; Walk with the dead; For fear of death.
by Phillip Larkin.
One cannot take photographs with a dictionary - Berger
The anxiety of NOT being productive
Between here and nowhere- Maurice Blanchot
The activation of a memory in a moment of crisis - victor burgin
Requiem for a dream
The old man and the gun
Notes to self.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Philip K Dick
Always interesting when mainstream types tell you how different they are.
Tomorrowland
A weird disconnect between needing people and a ‘someone’ and a total need to be absolutely on my own.
The architecture of a planned concealment - paraphrasing Lewis Baltz
Violator - Depeche Mode
Accelerator - FSOL
The future casts its shadow over the present in a strange reversal of the usual
Bertolt Brecht: photography in the hands of the bourgeoisie has become a terrible weapon against the truth. 1931.
Why film? Link to past. Chemical reaction to light. Latent image as metaphor.
BAE systems
Make a mock up book as a note book
Rooms for sleep cleansed of dreams - Ilya Ehrenburg
Prototype approximations
The drunkards den
The onrushing algorithmic (singularity)
A simple note
Studies and further studies in a dying culture - Christopher Caudwell
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism
Catastrophe anthem - Clark
A dependence on chaos
Anatomy of the peripheral nervous system
Coordinated management of meaning
Invisible manipulation data
Radical autonomy
Propositions and provocations
Immolations
Safe in the hands of love - Yves Tumor
The age of anxiety - WH Auden:
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Inertia
A series of photographs exploring the human condition and the inherent limitations this entails.
From the misrepresentation of life via social media, the Maslowian restrictions of food and shelter, the earth bound limitations sat in the historic understanding that all cultures are, eventually, bound to fail.
Cockroaches and rats. The alienating and engaging experience of London.
88 images. Total number of perfect ratio Fibonacci sequence.
Try some images with additions like text or blank areas.
Things behind screens, glass, coverings as comment about temporality and metaphysics. The subconscious. Things that are hidden or not immediately available to ones consciousness. Instinctive traits. Containment.
Systems built towers Broadwater Farm Haringey.
Anthropocene.
Fire nearly out. Record towards the end. Things running out. Empty fuel gauge.
Man made but seemingly natural spaces. Lea Bridge wetlands.
Toxic masculinity. Razors next to the bath. Intimate human elements.
Try to amalgamate James Sykes Photo work with the freedom of The Both And work.
Try to be spontaneous and authentic. Explore staged images. Shoot more.
Complex systems:
Overview: what is the study of Complex Systems?
Complex Systems is a new field of science studying how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviours of the system, and how the system interacts with its environment. Social systems formed (in part) out of people, the brain formed out of neurons, molecules formed out of atoms, the weather formed out of air flows are all examples of complex systems. The field of complex systems cuts across all traditional disciplines of science, as well as engineering, management, and medicine. It focuses on certain questions about parts, wholes and relationships. These questions are relevant to all traditional fields.
Why Complex Systems?
The study of complex systems is about understanding indirect effects. Problems that are difficult to solve are often hard to understand because the causes and effects are not obviously related. Pushing on a complex system “here” often has effects “over there” because the parts are interdependent. This has become more and more apparent in our efforts to solve societal problems or avoid ecological disasters caused by our own actions. The field of complex systems provides a number of sophisticated tools, some of them concepts that help us think about these systems, some of them analytical for studying these systems in greater depth, and some of them computer based for describing, modelling or simulating these systems.
Three approaches to the study of Complex Systems:
There are three interrelated approaches to the modern study of complex systems,
(1) how interactions give rise to patterns of behaviour,
(2) understanding the ways of describing complex systems, and
(3) the process of formation of complex systems through pattern formation and evolution.
The above is interesting in terms of intersectionality. Combine all of my thinking into one cohesive body of work with many narratives including micro and macro observations, relationships between things and interconnectedness.
Systems, Elements and Relations.
Try to make the work so any two/three images could be shown together and still make a cohesive statement. Get some prints made to try this out. Get 12 images printed by Labyrinth 12x16 for portfolio. Talk with the staff there about
style. Then find a portfolio review. Submit more often.
Reconsider: UCL Documentary Photography MA
Shoot some B&W? Maybe as a counterpoint to the colour? Fuji Neopan 400.
Shoot a roll of Fuji quickly this week to check the exposure.
Organise Lightroom folders, make one for film project
A brief history of complexity
The uncertainty principle
Vauxhall platform 3 looking back to city. Like Nigel Agar.
Re-enactments
Something struggled for and easily lost
The authenticity project
The contingent relations of complex systems
Make a book with blank pages - Ed Ruscha
A form of nostalgia
The malady of death
The future is still so much bigger than the past
Living in the end times - Zizek
William Gibson - near future - All tomorrow’s parties
The long collapse/emergency
Ex Vivo - ‘out of the living’, experiments done on human tissue outside of the human body
Obviously fake things
Overcoming the limitations of the substructure - El Lissitsky
The Constellations of Heaven - WB Yeats
Visually hungry social world
All film
Move away from square-on dead pan
The images must be multi-layered with multiple meanings.
Middle distance.
Slow, methodical, frame/check/move
Try to photograph my experience.
Missing M; Lack of home; London; City; Bars; Booze; Traveling; Different beds; Music; Work; Art; Politics; Blurred; Bar on Ridley Road.
All film but 6x9, 35mm and auto so varied;
Loosen up - channel Waplington;
Think of narrative over single images; Get out and make more work; Underground; Gentrification; Graffiti; Punk ethic; Gimme Shelter;
Mix of styles, images, subjects; Not clearly one thing; Found images; Rephotographed; Advertising images; The Spectacle;
A portrait of London; Old and new; Isolation; Loneliness; Impersonal; Closeness of people; Dirt; Sewers; Gleaming buildings; Vertical city; Moving; Slow sync flash.
Airbus Stevenage - BAE Systems
Use the personal to explore the universal
tripod close ups Lea Bridge river
How to photograph the Internet and politics - photograph WiFi hotspot locations
Something about circuits - the things that connect us…
Capitol park M62 massive blank buildings
TKMaxx M62 near A1
Ruinenwert - ruin value Brian Ladd
The Gun: Secret Plans and Clever Tricks.
The Edge Lands - a series of photographs about margins and the marginalised
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough
A Flask of wine, a Book of Verse and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness
…is Paradise enough
All palaces are temporary palaces
The solution machine
And sometimes it goes the other way
Days of future passed
When absence becomes a special kind of presence
Small Energies - Balil.
Old scenes. New details.
One shot in focus. Same shot out of focus
Living in the end times.
Poll tax riot - Trafalgar Square - Extinction Rebellion
A decision ‘for’ something is ‘always’ a decision ‘against’ something else.
This blog oulines my ideas, thinking and research.
POPs is about more than gentrification - it’s about disempowerment. A dystopian future where few own anything and everything has been privatised from the ground we stand on, the water we drink and the air we breathe, the seeds of which are clearly visible now.
Metaphor for my private experience of these pseudo-public spaces.These images attempt to disrupt the prevailing narrative of the spectacle.
It is possible to imagine that at some point in the future the landowner erects a fence around these spaces and charges entry fees and/or restricts access to these once communal spaces. This idea could be extended to those from particular social, ethnic or economic groups effectively making a two tiered experience of our cities - on that can afford to pay the other for those that cannot. This already exists, of course, through poverty and social exclusion, though the privatisation of these spaces would solidify this on a legal footing.
The Dystopia of Privatising Air:
Peter Brabeck, CEO of the world’s largest foodstuff company, Nestle, has begun plans to privatise the air we breathe within municipal borders across the globe.
Nestle’s idea is to make air a quantifiable commodity sold on the open market. The company would then contract with municipal leaders (from New York to New Zealand) to be the principal supplier of the air we breathe. Meaning: if New Yorkers wanted to breathe the air around them within the city’s limits, they would need to pay Nestle in order to do so.
This news comes on the heels of Brabeck’s announcement that he considers fresh water to be a commodity that should be wholly privatized rather than a human necessity to which global citizens have a right to unfettered access:
According to Brabeck, access to water is not a human right, and those who purport such claims are extremists.
Now, Nestle’s CEO is categorising the air we breathe as a commodity as well. “Those on the left backed by NGOs will say that access to air is a human right,” Braback said when reached for comment. “However, oxygen is just like anything else. It’s a commodity. People want it. And a market value should ascribed to it.”
When asked whether making air a commodity could potentially leave millions (or billions) of poor global citizens out in the cold, Braback rejected such thoughts as fear-mongering. “Once we know what air is worth, we’ll know how large the subsidies need to be to keep poor people breathing.”
With this in mind it is not impossible that in our lifetime the water we drink, the air we breathe, the building we live in and the land we stand on, we have no right to. A situation where citizenship is reduced to our ability to pay, or not, for access to our basic needs.
Kinder Scout mass trespass: http://www.kindertrespass.com/
Trafalgar Square - owned by the Queen - Poll Tax riot
Housing right to buy - privatising social housingTrace the journey/ownership of one piece of land.
Vernacular Landscape submission:
https://subjectivelyobjective.com/product/the-vernacular-of-landscape-submission-fee/
East Village letting agency:
http://www.getlivinglondon.com/about/history
News articles:
https://tclf.org/places/learn-what-are-cultural-landscapes/vernacular-landscapes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12771744
http://www.eastlondonhistory.co.uk/london-olympics-east-end-regeneration/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/11/granary-square-privately-owned-public-space
https://www.kingscross.co.uk/whos-developing-kings-cross
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/27/london-olympic-park-success-five-years-depends
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/25/squares-angry-privatisation-public-space
https://www.ft.com/content/45cd3dbe-34dd-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_privately_owned_public_spaces_in_London
http://www.gigl.org.uk/privately-owned-public-spaces/
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/the-first-map-of-londons-pseudo-public-spaceepidemic
http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/31529/1/Grosvenor%20literature%20review%20DL%20MD.pdf
